Thousands of applications, hundreds of servers, multiple cloud environments, several data centers and potentially numerous edge locations have introduced more complexity, risk, and cost. Add new application development methodologies, microservices, and containerization and it is easy to understand that traditional platforms and administration practices are not sufficient. This deficiency creates the need for data center modernization. Modern, secure, and scalable platforms with high degrees of automation for administration seamlessly integrate with a public cloud to create a true hybrid cloud experience. A hybrid cloud enables organizations to determine the location of their applications at any time and can make (or automate) that decision continuously. The decisions are based on:

• Economics – the cost of running applications in a specific location
• Physics – latency requirements for applications and proximity to data and users
• Land – regulations based on industry or government mandate for data or applications to be in a certain place

Further research shows that 72 percent of enterprises have a hybrid-first or private-first strategy 1 while 88 percent of cloud strategies include on-premises infrastructure 2.

Based on business requirements, IT professionals have the flexibility to choose the best location for their applications to run - either by running on-premises or moving workloads to the cloud. For the best of both worlds, applications can now be developed using a “build once, deploy anywhere" approach. As requirements change, workloads can be migrated to any hosting environment in an automated fashion without impacting business services.